Vries, Jan de. Altnordische Literaturgeschichte. 2 vols. Grun-
driss der germanischen Philologie, 15–6. Berlin: de Gruyter,
1941–42; rpt. 1964–67
Lindow, John. “Narrative and the Nature of Skaldic Poetry.” Arkiv
för nordisk fi lologi 92 (1981), 94–121
Hermann Pálsson. “A Florilegium in Norse from Medieval
Orkney.” In The Northern and Western Isles in the Viking
World: Survival, Continuity and Change. Ed. Alexander
Fenton and Hermann Pálsson. Edinburgh: Donald, 1984,
pp. 258–64.
Bjarne Fidjestøl
BLANCHE OF CASTILE (1188–1252)
At the age of twelve, Blanche of Castile, the daugh-
ter of Alfonso VIII of Castile, was married to Prince
Louis of France, who would reign briefl y as Louis VIII
(1223–26). Louis’s early death while on the Albigensian
Crusade left the throne to their young son, Louis IX.
The regency was entrusted not to a male relative or a
council of barons but to Blanche.
In the fi rst years of her regency, Blanche was con-
fronted with armed rebellions intended to displace her
and with the serious possibility of a reversal of French
successes in the southern lands that had been conquered
in the Albigensian Crusade. She triumphed in both
cases. Gifted with an iron will and clever in her ability
to cultivate allies but careful not to link her fortunes
too closely to any baronial house, such as the house of
Champagne, through a hasty remarriage, she pursued a
policy of divide-and-conquer against the rebellious bar-
ons. Their uprisings and shows of force never achieved
a decision in their favor. Blanche’s success against the
baronial opposition in the north was both cause and
effect of her maintenance of French dominance in the
south. The swiftness and decisiveness of her actions
against the northerners induced the southern nobles to
negotiate their grievances; and the army that had been
left in the south at her husband’s death remained, de-
spite some diffi culties, loyally commanded and in fi rm
control. By 1229 and the Treaty of Meaux-Paris, the
opposition in Languedoc acknowledged its defeat. The
prestige of victory in the south encouraged loyalty and
support in the north when the crown had to respond to
new baronial demonstrations against it in the 1230s led
by, among others, the titular count of Brittany, Pierre
Mauclerc.
Blanche’s regency was distinguished by a balanced
foreign policy. On the one hand, the traditional enemy,
the English, never effectively made inroads into those
provinces, like Normandy, that they had lost in 1204.
On the other hand, she made no concerted effort to
eject the English from their remaining territories in
Aquitaine. In the war of words and sometimes of men
between the emperor Frederick II and the papacy, she
kept to a neutral path.
In the later 1230s down to 1244, Blanche’s role in
government gradually diminished. Her son reached
adulthood, married, and became more active, especially
in military affairs. This translation of power was not
entirely easy. There was mutual dislike between Blanche
and her son’s wife, Marguerite of Provence; Blanche
also vigorously opposed Louis’s decision in 1244 to take
the crusader’s vow. Nonetheless, she remained a close
political adviser to the king, far closer than his wife,
and Louis entrusted the reins of government to Blanche
when he embarked on crusade in 1248.
As a deeply devout and morally strict woman, an
enthusiastic patroness of the church, especially the
Cistercian order, and a Castilian who grew up in an
environment of fi erce commitment to the holy war of
reconquest in Spain, Blanche’s opposition to her son’s
crusade remains something of a puzzle. But however she
felt about his enterprise in the abstract, she devoted her
full energies to making certain that he was well supplied
and that he need not trouble himself about governance
at home while he fought in the East. She managed to
negotiate a two-year extension of the clerical income
tax of one-tenth in order both to fi nance the war effort
and to replenish the king’s coffers after the disastrous
early phase of the crusade that saw Louis captured and
ransomed in Egypt. She acted with her characteristic
fi rmness in 1249, on the death of the count of Toulouse,
when a movement took shape to turn aside the settlement
of 1229 that designated her son Alphonse to be the new
count of Toulouse. She thought well of the so-called
Pastoureaux (1251), Flemish and northern French rustics
who proclaimed themselves crusaders determined to
rescue and otherwise aid the king. But when bands of
these forces rioted in Paris and pillaged other towns, it
was she who authorized and oversaw their destruction.
Blanche died in November 1252. When her son, still in
the Holy Land, received the news some months later,
he succumbed to a grief so profound that it troubled all
who knew and loved him.
See also Louis IXFurther Reading
Sivéry, Gerard. Blanche de Castille. Paris: Fayard, 1990.
William Chester JordanBOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI (1313–1375)
Boccaccio is now best known as the author of the
Decameron; but he wrote many works very different
in kind, and in the century following his death he was
most famous as a humanist and a herald of the Renais-
sance. He was the illegitimate son of a businessman,
Boccaccino di Chelino, and a mother whose name isBOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI